I Always Wanted to Fly

by Wolfgang W. E. Samuel

  “The unique thing about Thule,” Joe Gyulavics continued, “was landing on a snow-packed runway. At low temperatures, it really was no problem. You could practically brake on the cold snowpack like it was concrete. Of course, you had to be judicious about it. If you steered too fast, you kept on going, as if you were in a car on ice. Our antiskid brakes helped. In spring, when there was melting, it could get touchy at times. Getting ready to take off one time, I taxied up to a little apron near the lip of the runway. There was a slight uphill grade, and two KC-97s sat on the apron before me, running their engines, melting some of the snow. When I came up the incline, it had turned to slick ice. I couldn’t see the ice from the cockpit. All of a sudden, the airplane started sliding backward and sideways. I had no control. On a tandem gear, this was not a pleasant experience. The nose was rotating, and there were snowbanks all around. I hit the number one and two engines and swung around, hoping I wouldn’t damage the wingtips or run the tail into a snowbank. I finally managed to swing her around. When we returned from that mission, the crew chief found a sizable dent in the left wingtip. Things like that only happened at Thule.”

  “Thule Air Base itself was adjacent to a Danish headquarters and weather station,” Charlie Phillips recounted, “and seventy-five miles from the nearest Eskimo village, Qanaq. When the once-remote Danish weather station at Thule was expanded to become an American air base, the Eskimos living there were relocated to the newly built village of Qanaq, located on a beach next to the ocean north of Thule to accommodate both summer and winter hunting and fishing. We had virtually no contact with the Eskimos.”

  Only once during two deployments to Thule did Joe Gyulavics meet an Eskimo. “It was in 1956 during Project Homerun. We test fired our guns as soon as we leveled off, about thirty to forty minutes out. You think you are out there with nothing but snow and ice beneath you from frozen horizon to horizon. Because of the total darkness, we couldn’t see anything. You can imagine my surprise when after landing one day I was asked if I test fired my guns. Yeah, I answered, we do on every mission at the same place. A couple of Eskimos had come in to the Danish Council carrying several 20mm shell casings. ‘They fell from the sky,’ the Eskimos said. Even near the North Pole, you couldn’t be sure there wasn’t someone out there.”

  During project Homerun, crews fought outside temperatures of forty degrees below zero Fahrenheit or lower with fur-lined parkas, bulky mittens, heavily padded flight suits, and clumsy mukluk boots. Maintenance people had a particularly difficult time with tasks that required them to remove their bulky Arctic mittens. One man held a stopwatch with a second hand, while the other man worked. They completed tasks in stages, switching off to keep their fingers from getting frostbitten. Photo- and electronic-reconnaissance aircraft frequently operated in pairs, with an RB-47E photo aircraft teamed with an RB-47H electronic-reconnaissance aircraft. However, the planes did not fly in formation or even in sight of one another. All air crews were briefed individually, and because of a strictly applied need-to-know security rule, no air crew knew exactly where the others were going. The Thule missions of 1956 photomapped the islands of Novaya Zemlya and their atomic test site. These aircraft flew behind the Ural Mountains and across Siberia and confirmed that the Soviet Union’s northern regions were poorly defended against air attack. Subsequently, many of the SAC bomber routes against the Soviet Union were planned to cross the top of the world. Throughout this difficult operation, not one RB-47 was lost as a result of accident or Soviet fighters. Not that the Soviets didn’t try on occasion. Joe Gyulavics remembered “a bunch of fighters coming up out of Novaya Zemlya. We heard them launch. The Ravens picked up the fighter radars on their receivers. I saw the contrails of the Russian fighters, but they couldn’t overtake us. An interesting time. We thought we were invincible and immortal. We never thought of any downside.”

  Colonel Charles L. Phillips Jr.

  Distinguished Flying Cross (3), Air Medal

  Lieutenant Colonel Charles L. Phillips was assistant director of operations for the 4083rd Strategic Wing at Thule in 1958. Charlie was a World War II veteran, like so many of the air crew who served in SAC. In 1945 he flew twenty-nine combat missions against Japan in B-29s out of Saipan, dropping firebombs from altitudes too low for high-altitude antiaircraft guns to be effective and too high for Japanese automatic weapons fire to reach. That tactic was one of General LeMay’s innovations. In the process, pilots discovered the jet stream, which could almost bring to a standstill a B-29 bomber flying into the wind. Charlie’s missions had been grueling fifteen-hour flights, and he sympathized with the RB-47 reconnaissance crews, which flew similarly lengthy missions out of Thule. Charlie had been able to get out of his seat to stretch aching muscles, but the RB-47 crew had no such luxury.

  Charlie Phillips was born to Presbyterian missionaries on July 6, 1918, in Pyongyang, Korea. He attended the local American school, whose students came from Korea, Japan, and Japanese-occupied provinces in China. The school sat on the downwind leg of a Japanese flying school, and Charlie used to visit the base and watch the Japanese planes taxi and take off. He developed an early interest in flying. On one occasion, he saw from his classroom window the propeller coming off a plane that had just taken off. Next, the engine fell off the plane. The pilot parachuted. Charlie and a friend ran out of their class to help the pilot, who landed in an adjacent field. The schoolmaster did not take kindly to such wild enthusiasm and moved Charlie’s desk away from the window. In 1931, on a visit to the United States, Charlie’s father took him and his brother for a twenty-minute airplane ride in a Waco cabin plane. For Charlie it was an unforgettable experience—he loved the feeling of flying and the view of the world it gave him. He wondered how he could become a pilot. In 1935, after graduating from high school, Charlie returned to the United States and entered UCLA. In 1940 he joined the Army Air Corps, earning his pilot wings and a commission as second lieutenant just five weeks before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

  While at Thule, Phillips recalled, “I lay on my cot in BOQ 713, listening to the howling winds outside. I thought of my next-to-last combat mission, my twenty-eighth, which I flew on August 6, 1945, the day the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. I ran out of fuel after an unexpected encounter with the jet stream and had to ditch my aircraft. I was apprehensive about putting the big bomber in the calm waters of the Pacific. My crew tumbled about considerably when I did, but fortunately only one of us was severely injured. On August 9 the second atomic bomb was dropped by a B-29 from Tinian. Still, peace negotiations with the Japanese dragged on. On August 14, I launched along with three hundred other B-29s against the Japanese army arsenal at Osaka. I expected to be recalled any moment because I thought a peace agreement was imminent, but it didn’t happen. We dropped our lethal load of high-explosive bombs and watched as the Japanese arsenal below us was reduced to rubble. Shortly after we landed at Saipan, the Japanese surrendered. I know it was August 14, 1945, in the United States, the fifteenth on Saipan.”

  When Thule closed and an aircraft had to divert to an alternate or emergency airfield, few options were available. The most practical choice open to a pilot was emergency airfields on Greenland itself, fields that offered a minimum of support and required a maximum of pilot skill. Recovering aircraft from emergency airfields such as Weather Station Nord became a major operation fraught with risk to the aircraft as well as the maintenance crews who tried to get the marooned jet airborne again. One such emergency landing occurred in April 1958 at Station Nord, on the northeast tip of Greenland. An RB-47H, tail number 3-0281, of the 55th Wing and piloted by Captain Kenney Addison, was returning from a routine reconnaissance mission along the Siberian frontier when Thule closed for phase III winds. The winds blew across the runway at a right angle and resulted in zero-zero conditions—zero visibility, zero ceiling. Either the severe crosswinds or the limited visibility was enough to keep the RB-47 from landing. Only two practical alternatives offered themselves to the tired
air crew. One was Sondrestrom, on the west coast of the southern third of Greenland, with an approach up a fjord and a runway facing a towering ice shelf. The other option was Nord. The crew chose Nord, a barren airstrip adjacent to a Danish weather station that offered only a snow- and ice-covered eight-thousand-foot runway. However, Nord had runway lights, the only sure way for a pilot to positively locate the runway in wintry conditions.

  View of the airstrip at the Danish weather station Nord, 1958. C. Phillips.

  “I was startled when my phone rang,” Charlie Phillips related. “The senior command-post officer asked me to try, if I possibly could, to come over. I dressed quickly and as warmly as possible. I pulled the hood of my fur-lined parka around my face and stepped into the Arctic whiteout. It was unusual for anyone to be asked to go outside after a phase had struck. When I reached my destination, my parka was encrusted in a thick layer of ice and frost. I was told that the RB-47 aircraft which had launched the night before had landed at Station Nord and that as soon as the winds died down, I was to lead a rescue party to get the aircraft back to Thule. I sat down and began planning the recovery of the stranded RB-47H with the tail number 3-0281.”

  Aircraft 3-0281 had made an uneventful landing at Nord. Captain Addison had taxied the aircraft to the center of a small parking area near a building that he presumed was the weather station. Before shutting down the engines, he blew the approach and landing chutes off to the side. Then, as the engines spooled down with a high-pitched whine, an eerie silence settled over the aircraft. In spite of their helmets, the air crew’s ears had endured hours of incessant wind noise as they had cut at five hundred miles per hour through the cold skies of the Arctic world at thirty-eight thousand feet. One of the three Ravens sitting in the aisle below the pilots opened the entry hatch and let down the aluminum ladder. The six crew members emerged slowly, dressed in their bulky winter flying suits, stiff from sitting for hours strapped in ejection seats. The crew secured their classified logs and tapes and locked the aircraft. Then they turned to their Danish host, who greeted them in good English. It was an occasion to celebrate. Rarely did anyone drop by in the winter months for a visit, emergency or otherwise. The arrival of the Americans was a welcome interruption. The air crew quickly learned that Danish aquavit kept ice-cold and drunk in one bold gesture was lethal. They enjoyed the cheese that was served along with the sleep-inducing drink and soon excused themselves. Their host provided blankets, and they slept on the heated concrete floor of the laundry room. To fly back to Thule, they knew they would need outside assistance. They had no way to start their engines.

  Three days after 3-0281 landed at Nord, the winds died down at Thule, and Charlie Phillips and his rescue party got under way. “I took two KC-97 aerial-refueling tankers with full fuel loads from the 100th Air Refueling Squadron and sent them off to Nord. The 100th came from Pease AFB in New Hampshire. They were pulling a six-week rotational tour at Thule. Then I had an MD-3 power cart loaded on a Berlin Airlift–vintage C-54 transport to power up the RB-47, I put my maintenance crew on the same plane, and I followed in one of the KC-97s. First and foremost on my mind was the safety of my men and the aircraft we were to rescue. I knew that everything we had to do needed to be done carefully and deliberately. I wouldn’t have anything bad happen to that airplane. As the team leader, I decided to personally handle the potentially most dangerous operation myself—operating the forklift in close proximity to the RB-47. I was told that a forklift was permanently positioned at Nord to unload aircraft delivering fuel to Nord in fifty-five-gallon drums. After our arrival, I had the Danish lift operator explain its operation to me, and then I practiced driving, tilting, and lifting for half an hour before I certified myself as being ready to operate the lift. The outside temperatures as usual were in the forty below zero Fahrenheit range. With the forklift, I lifted the maintenance officer, a major from the 55th Wing, up onto the nose of the RB-47 to enable him to connect a flexible refueling hose to the aircraft’s refueling receptacle. I carefully drove the lift within inches of the RB-47, lifting the major on a pallet to his icy perch.

  Colonel Phillips operating the forklift, 1958. Maintenance men standing on the lift pallet are connecting a flexible fuel hose to the tanker’s extended boom. C. Phillips.

  “Once the hose connection was made from the refueling boom of the tanker to the receiving receptacle of the RB-47, the KC-97 started three of its four engines—one to power its brakes, the other two to run its fuel pumps. Since there was no tug to tow the KC-97 into position, the huge tanker aircraft had to be backed in by reversing the propeller pitch. It was a slow and tedious process. Once the first tanker discharged its fuel, it had to be disconnected from the RB-47 and taxied away, and the second tanker had to be backed into position, again very carefully. During the refueling with the KC-97s, the icy wind blast from their running engines frosted up the RB-47. The frost had to come off the jet before it could fly. I had two ropes tied around the waist of one of my men and lifted him with the forklift up on a wing of the RB-47. Two men on each side of the wing held the ropes tied around the wing walker’s waist to keep him from slipping off while he brushed off the ice and snow, using a push broom. A hazard to the man cleaning the ice off the wings was a double row of vortex generators sticking up on top of each wing near the tips. Each blade was two inches high. A fall onto these knifelike blades could cause serious injury. The operation took over six hours from start to finish. No one was injured, and nothing was damaged. We also installed new approach and landing chutes in the RB-47. Then I wired the command post at Thule for instructions, which came by teletype over the Danish weathernet. Judging from the telegram, the Thule weather forecast wasn’t all that good. Conditions varied, with blowing snow; winds at twenty-five knots, gusting to thirty-five; and moderate to severe turbulence. We were advised to depart after 0200 Zulu, Greenwich mean time, on the twenty-eighth, during the best anticipated weather conditions. KC-97 tankers would be standing by at Thule to launch in case additional fuel was required. The RB-47 was to use Goose Bay, Labrador and Sondrestrom in Greenland as alternates.

  Final connections being made to the KC-97 boom nozzle, 1958. Toggles are in place and fuel is ready to flow to the RB-47. Note the tail number on the left forward gear door of the RB-47H. C. Phillips.

  “When the time came for the RB-47 to leave, everyone at Nord came out to watch. I remember the RB-47 taxiing to the end of the snow-packed runway and then, as it so often happened, the heat from its six engines generated a huge ice cloud. The cloud settled between the RB-47 and us watchers. We didn’t know if the cloud also enveloped the RB-47. Then we heard the throaty roar from six jet engines, and suddenly the aircraft emerged from the other side of the ice cloud as it rose into the milky white sky above Station Nord, heading for Thule. We all cheered. At that moment it was our plane. We had put our full energy into getting that bird airborne, and we felt good about our accomplishment. There were smiles all around. I shook hands with everyone and thanked them for their hard work and a job well done. After the two KC-97 tankers departed, our Danish hosts invited the rest of us to share some food and drink with them. We did for an hour or two, then exhaustion and the aquavit overcame us. We slept on the same heated concrete floor in the weather station’s laundry room where the B-47 crew had slept before us. We left the next day in the C-54.”

  On July 1, 1960, only two months after the shootdown of Francis Gary Powers’s U-2 photo-reconnaissance aircraft near Sverdlovsk, an RB-47H reconnaissance aircraft with tail number 3-0281 took off in the early morning darkness from RAF Brize Norton. The RB-47, the same aircraft that two years earlier had recovered at Station Nord, was on a peripheral reconnaissance mission. Its route was similar to that flown in 1954 by Captain Harold Austin, except that the plane did not intend to penetrate Soviet airspace, as Austin had. Captain Willard Palm was the aircraft’s commander, Captain Bruce Olmstead the copilot, and Captain John McCone the navigator. The three Ravens flying in the reconnaissance capsul
e in the bomb bay were Captain Eugene Posa and Lieutenants Oscar Goforth and Dean Phillips. Over the icy waters of the Barents Sea, aircraft 3-0281 was shot down by a Soviet MiG-19. Captains McCone and Olmstead survived, spending seven months in the infamous Lubyanka Prison, a place of torture and sorrow since the days of the czar. Premier Nikita Khrushchev released the two men as a goodwill gesture toward newly elected U.S. President John F. Kennedy in January 1961. The other four crew members perished. It was Lieutenant Oscar Goforth’s first Cold War reconnaissance mission.

  Chapter 13

  The Last Flight of 3-4290

  Copilot Hank Dubuy watched the MiGs as they positioned themselves behind his aircraft and took a couple of pictures. The lead MiG suddenly initiated the attack by firing its cannons. It was war. Hank dropped his camera. As the shells slammed into the aircraft, he requested permission from his pilot to fire. “Shoot the bastard down,” exclaimed Mattison. . . . As he proceeded to drop the aircraft toward the lower cloud layer, Mattison called for the navigator to give him a heading, “to get the hell out of here.”